‘A new Al Gore’

Mere days before he sounded a highly public alarm in Atlanta about what he sees as the drastic erosion of Americans’ civil liberties, Gore appeared before a standing-room-only audience in Nashville to deliver an apocalyptic — if highly specific — forecast about the planet’s imminent ruin from global warming.

Introducing himself at Vanderbilt thusly, “I am Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States,” the self-described “recovering politician” then stood modestly in a darkened auditorium at the bottom of a huge, wall-sized screen and narrated a slide show to end all slide shows.

A partial list of the contents: hybrid energy sources, the greenhouse-gas effect, Third World environmental practices, the proliferation of carbon dioxide, the convection energy of hurricanes, the evaporation of drinking-water sources on the Tibetan plateau (river by river), the paradoxical flood-drought syndrome, the melting methane in Siberia, pine-beetle infestation in the American West, the history of the Ice Age, and the physics of solar-ray absorption.

Smirking Chimp